


something just like this

by Mia_Zeklos



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Body Language, Din does some questionable things to a bunch of flowers for a time, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Pre-Relationship, Symbolism, Tenderness, Witch Curses, and many bad analyses of it, but that's best left ignored, the closest I can get to a genre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-23 01:54:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30048135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mia_Zeklos/pseuds/Mia_Zeklos
Summary: The way the curse works is both simple and infuriatingly complex – the wreath is only visible to his eyes and is only bestowed upon his true love’s head (the witch’s words, not his, though he’s grown rather tired of repeating that to himself over the last few days). More importantly, it changes depending on her emotions.(When Din is cursed by a witch in retaliation for him killing her partner, it's Cara that bears the brunt of it - even if she doesn't quite realise that.)
Relationships: Din Djarin/Cara Dune
Comments: 7
Kudos: 24





	something just like this

**Author's Note:**

> This was written by a prompt posted on tumblr many moons ago. The last month has been absolutely insane in every possible aspect of my life and my creativity has been in Mariana Trench the entire time, so I'm acutely aware that this is _bad_ but also really, really want to start back on, with literally anything at all. Nevertheless, hope you guys enjoy it and as always, feedback is most welcome!

Din hadn’t had a moment of peace ever since the spell had hit him.

It’s stupid; he realises that perfectly well. There’s no need for him to feel so sidetracked by something that that witch – not a Jedi, as there is apparently a difference – had done to him, considering that the reason she’d done it in the first place had been specifically to sidetrack him. If anything, a much better way to react would have been to will it out of existence; pretend it’s not there at all until it finally wears off.

As it turns out, he can’t. It’s impossible to look away whenever Cara is around and, much to his misfortune, she’s _constantly_ around just now.

“Grogu!” She exclaims is that sweet, higher voice that always comes out when she sees him, reluctantly affectionate like only she can be. “Come over here!”

He does, waddling away from Din and in her general direction with a happy squeal, doubtlessly glad to see another familiar face. The flowers wreathed around Cara’s head blossom to life once again, bursting with colour as her joy raises its head, and he initiates yet another failed attempt at redirecting his attention.

The flowers are exactly what he would expect from a woman like Cara – a bright scarlet freckled with black, some of them so small that they’re nearly invisible from afar and others the size of poppies and carnations, shielding her eyes from his view when she fondly shakes her head and welcomes Grogu in her arms. He’d think they’d be in the way, but he knows it’s not possible – no one can see them apart from him, after all.

The way the curse works is both simple and infuriatingly complex – the wreath is only visible to his eyes and is only bestowed upon his true love’s head (the witch’s words, _not_ his, though he’s grown rather tired of repeating that to himself over the last few days). More importantly, it changes depending on her emotions.

It had been startling at first, but eventually, Din had started to make sense of the signals the magic flowers sent out: their petals unfurl whenever something piques her interest in an uncanny resemblance to the way the kid’s ears betray his emotion, and just like with the ears in question, the flowers slump back down when she’s disappointed. They grow darker when she’s angry and stand fully open, as if on edge, whenever _she_ is on edge; just as glorious as she is in a fight. They tremble with excitement when the adrenaline rushes through her, sharp as knives while she takes aim.

They close down, as if not yet fully in bloom, whenever he’s near.

Din had done his best not to jump to conclusions. He _still_ does his best to unlearn the pattern of the magic – of _her_ – but he fails, time and time again. Cara’s emotions are volatile and shift quickly enough to make him lightheaded and after a few days, he can always, always tell what she’s feeling to the smallest detail. It’s unnerving.

Worse: it’s breaking his heart.

At first, Din had assumed that the witch had done it so that it would serve as a distraction – he’s preoccupied with what Cara could be feeling as it is and another layer would be an excellent way for the witch in question to get him killed indirectly. It hadn’t taken him long to realise that what she had done had been far more thoroughly planned. It’s not an attempt on his life; not in the way he’d anticipated. It’s _revenge_.

So maybe he had killed her partner. He’d had no choice – the other Omwati had tried to trespass on _his_ ship in search of _his_ Foundling, and therefore he’d had it coming.

“One more step,” Cara had said, blaster trained on the witch’s head, “and you’ll end up like him, understood?”

The Omwati’s face had been twisted with grief and rage, but she’d nodded and carefully inched backwards and out of their brand ship.

Din had _almost_ had his guard down by the time the magic had shot out of her upturned palms.

It hadn’t been lethal, clearly. Cara had laughed about it after that – about how ineffectual the attack the attack had been – and the still-not-quite pen petals had shook with her amusement. It had only been later, when Din had sought out answers from his defeated adversary, that he’d realised what she had actually done.

 _His true love_. It’s a ridiculous concept, of course. No one is really meant for anyone else. Life is all chance and accidental glimpses of happiness. This is what Cara is – ephemeral and always just out of his reach, too quick for him to be able to keep her in one place for long. _Destiny_ isn’t really in her dictionary – she carves her own fate out of what life throws at her, bit by bit. She’s certainly not _his_.

Apart from the fact that, apparently, the witch had picked up something quite different from him. For a time, he had thought that forcing that realisation on him had been the plan, but he’d been proven wrong soon enough; it had been much more insidious than that.

The witch hadn’t taken Cara away from him. She hadn’t separated them in any way. She’d just left him alone with the growing understanding that Cara had never been his to have – his to keep – to begin with.

It’s a slow death of a kind; he can give her that much. And it’ the worst punishment she could have thought of, short of killing either one of them.

Now, the flowers are open wide, shimmering with her joy as she watches the kid wander around the ship, studying his new surroundings. Din tries to keep him away from anything he might be better off staying away from, but he keeps his eyes on her, too. Those are familiar emotions – joy, fondness, love – and watches them shrivel up and die along with his heart when she turns to him instead. “Think we should show him his room?”

He waves her forward with a sigh of resignation. “Lead the way.”

~.~

It’s late at night – well, it’s always night in cold space, but they’ve been awake for entirely too long – by the time the kid’s asleep and Din has a moment to himself again and he returns to the cockpit to find Cara fast asleep in the co-pilot’s chair, knees tucked against her chest, the wreath in her hair more vibrant than ever.

For a moment, it takes his breath away. The red mass of flowers flutters the way one’s eyelids tend to when asleep, bright and nearly gleaming, almost dripping nectar at the edges. She’ll wake in a less rested state than she’d been to begin with if she spends the night asleep in the miserably small seat, he reckons; it’s a good thing that by now, he’s specialised in coaxing her out of her sleep within getting shot.

“Cara,” he whispers, careful not to startle her. “Cara. It’s bed time.” He feels silly, for a moment – this isn’t the kid he’s talking to, here – but it doesn’t seem to matter. She doesn’t even flinch. She does lean against his touch, however, head lolling onto his forearm where he’s still trying to nudge her awake. The flowers, all entangled in jet black hair as they are, sway dangerously towards him.

Terribly sweet scent wraps him in and pulls him under immediately. Din tries – he honestly does – to pull away and leave her be, her discomfort tomorrow be damned, but he _has_ to check; has to see. What aspect of him does this to her? What is it about him that make her as cautious and withdrawn as the flowers suggest she is?

Whatever the answer is, it’s not one he’s getting tonight, it would appear – as he waits, dreading the, by now, painfully familiar reaction, it slowly dawns on him that it isn’t coming.

It’s barely any contact at all – he traces one fingertip over the edge of one of the petals, watching in fascination as it trembles under his touch. It feels strangely _real_ for something that is nothing but magic and, stranger still, it must feel like touching some kind of phantom limb, because Cara shifts in her seat, eyes flickering back to awareness as she comes to.

He lets go as if she’d burned him, enraptured as she blinks up at him, still dazed with sleep.

“Morning, Mando.” The flowers open up even further than he’d thought possible, big enough that he can barely see the braid on the side of her head. He’d never seen them behave like this before and it’s almost enough to distract him from the way she stretches out self-indulgently, the graceful arch of her back that always makes his throat go dry only barely taking second place to the sudden bloom of life reigning around her. “What’s up?”

“It’s not morning yet,” he says, still far too enthralled for anyone’s good. “You can’t sleep here.”

“That a new rule?” Despite her protests, she rubs the sleep away from her eyes with a yawn and gets to her feet. “No sleeping in the cockpit?”

Din carefully sidesteps the innuendo he’s sure must be lurking somewhere around the corner. There’s no trusting Cara with those, especially considering that there’s no weight behind it. It is, much to his regret, the one area in her life where she seems to be all talk, at least when it comes to him. “I’ve done it before. Not pleasant.” When she seems cognisant enough to walk back to her quarters, he gives her an encouraging nudge forward, eager to have her back out of his sight before he’s had the chance to overanalyse this.

It doesn’t quite work out – contact turns out to be a mistake, he immediately realises as awareness seems to hit her all at once and while she doesn’t visibly react, there’s no hiding the flowers – they retract and close in an instant and she shoots him one of her usual dazzling smiles. It’s as warm as they always are, but it doesn’t quite reach him this time; not with the additional knowledge that Cara doesn’t even know he has.

Is it something she needs, this love, but not from him? It’s only when it had occurred to her that they’d touched that she’d closed herself off again in stubborn, if subconscious, refusal to surrender even an inch of her carefully crafted, hard-won independence.

It’s almost as if he had known, Din thinks; this additional bit of defeat doesn’t hurt anywhere near as much as the initial understanding had. By now, he’d grown used to the taste of it.

~.~

It’s weeks later, during a quick stop on Nevarro, that things start to click into place.

The day before had been rough, even by their standards, and Din is content with doing nothing in particular other than sorting through Cara’s bottomless well of neglected paperwork, filling out the details of the cases he’d been present for, shooting a cautious look in her direction every now and again. The flaming red crown filling the room with that fragrance he’d come to associate with her alone is cautiously open, the occasional irritated shiver betraying her train of thought as she comes across the ones recalling the bad memories.

They’d had a close call yesterday. It had been Karga this time, though it could have been any of them – one wrong step on the invasive Imperial ship’s landing platform mid-battle and he’d almost fallen to his death on the lava flats way down below, with only Cara’s grasp on his wrist holding him in place. He had come out of it unscathed – they all had, in the end – but it had shaken them all, to some degree. Cara’s face says nothing of the sort, of course, but it’s obvious in every other part of her, the tension leaking out all over the office, clear in the sharp, curt movements she uses to sort through the documentation, as if it’s all personally responsible for her nearly botched mission.

It _had_ been a close call, but it had also been a success and finally, Din can’t bear the silence a moment longer.

“You shouldn’t be angry at him.” He’s going for placating, but the glare she sends back is enough to make him doubt his talents as a peacemaker. “It could have happened to any of us.”

“I’m not angry.” Everything about her would suggest otherwise, but he wouldn’t dare point it out just now. The flowers flare out with what he knows by now is anxiety and it makes _him_ anxious in turn, as if her feelings have somehow managed to bleed into him. They must have, really, and he’s allowed it readily – there are few things he’d like as much as letting her in, anger and all. “It’s just—”

Karga uses her moment of hesitation to stride directly into her office with his usual flare, unexpected enough for Din to push his chair away from the desk as if he’d been caught doing something far more nefarious than trying to comfort their mutual friend, and the brief discomfort that _that_ train of thought takes him on is blessedly interrupted by the sight of Cara’s wreath shifting yet again.

It’s something he’s seen time and time again and it feels surreal now that it’s not directed at him, but it’s there all the same – the startled reaction, the sudden freezing of her body right before the flowers close in on themselves and nearly retract back into their stems.

He knows this feeling – knows what it looks like, in any case. It’s far easier to try and see it for what it is when he’s not on the defensive, eager to read it in the worst possible way because it’s directed at him. It looks like caution and a brush of fear; it looks like the tentative sort of love that Cara directs at the kid whenever she thinks he’s not around to see it; it looks like what she would call love if knowing it hadn’t scarred her so deeply already. It looks like the way she looks at him.

 _Oh_.

“Yes, boss?” Cara grits out, seemingly already poised for attack, but it’s far easier to see through it now that he knows what he knows. Karga launches into whatever it is that he needs form her, but Din isn’t listening anymore, the entirety of his attention redirected to his sudden discovery. This is it, then. _Love_. It had been love all along.

~.~

It grows easier, gradually – this newfound familiarity. With one more piece of the puzzle that Cara had been since the very start put into place, the time they spend together feels much more straightforward – where he’s concerned, at least. She shouldn’t be able to feel a difference, considering that nothing about her own life had changed in the meantime, but it must be something about him that she’s catching on to because she’s more open now; not quite as careful as she had once been. They still have their tense moments, what with the sort of lives they both live, but with that aside, it’s— simple. Uncomplicated. Din basks in it guiltily, doing his level best to not give himself away. It’s as if Cara feels _seen_ , all of a sudden, ever since that day in her office back on Nevarro and this time around, it’s more of a relief than the usual terror.

It’s a privilege he accepts quietly for the most part, grateful that he doesn’t have to acknowledge it. The witch’s questionable curse has yet to wear off and he’s not sure what he’d have to do to trigger it out of their collective lives, but it’s no longer something he thinks of quite so often – by now, it doesn’t hurt, with how much the behaviour of the flowers had changed. They open the way they would in a fight, but softer, sweeter, and the coil of anxiety curling through him whenever Cara turns to look at him has faded away to nothing, replaced with a wordless sort of contentment. It had been exhausting, being on the defensive against a perceived enemy that he knows nothing about, and she must be able to see the change, nonsensical as it must appear on her end. He can live with that. Perplexing her as much as she had done to him is hardly a concern, lingering only on the periphery of a mind far more preoccupied with something entirely new – this go around, when he catches Cara’s eye and she offers a smile in return, the world drowns in colour.


End file.
